What Are the Benefits of Environmental Education?

By Leanna Barrett, Head of Liberty Woodland School

If environmental education is ultimately about helping children feel more connected to the world around them, then perhaps the most important question is this: What happens to young people when they grow up with that connection intact?

The benefits of environmental education are not only academic. In many ways, they are deeply human.

You see it first in small things: children who still notice things, teenagers who can still think deeply and young people who are capable of sustained attention in a world designed to fracture it constantly. Increasingly, these qualities feel less ordinary than they should. 

Children and teenagers who learn to understand, question and care for the world around them can become more engaged in their learning, more capable of thinking critically and more settled in themselves, and what that looks like changes with age. 

In this blog, we examine the main benefits of environmental education, and how it has an impact on children differently from nursery and primary school through to secondary school and beyond. 

What Are the Main Benefits of Environmental Education?

Environmental education is learning to understand, care for and take responsibility for the natural world. The main benefits are:

• Engagement: real questions and real problems give children a reason to learn.
• Critical thinking: children learn to investigate, weigh evidence and form their own views.
• Wellbeing: time spent connecting with nature is linked to improved wellbeing in children.
• Responsibility: knowledge combined with agency shows children that their choices count.
• Confidence: being capable and useful builds self-belief that rests on experience.

It Makes Learning Feel Real and Worth Engaging With

Environmental education allows learning to feel alive and relevant. Children engage more readily when a question is real: why a pond has dried up, how much packaging a class throws away in a week or which birds visit the school grounds. Each draws on science, maths, geography and writing at once, and the answer belongs to the child because they found it themselves.

The research points the same way. In Natural England's four-year Natural Connections project, covering 125 schools in the South West, 92 per cent of teachers said pupils were more engaged when learning outdoors.

It Builds Critical Thinking and a Sense of Agency

An older student exploring sustainability, biodiversity or ethical questions around technology and environmental systems is not simply “learning content”. They are learning to think critically about the world they are inheriting and their place within it. Younger children begin with noticing, comparing and asking why.

Environmental education gives young people opportunities to move beyond passive consumption and into participation: to investigate, to question, to build, to debate, to solve problems and to contribute meaningfully. 

Questions such as whether a local green space is better left wild or opened up for play, or how the benefits of a new technology should be weighed against its environmental cost, have no tidy answers. This is what makes them good material for thinking. 

Children and teenagers who work through these questions themselves learn to test ideas against evidence and to hold a view while staying open to changing it.

It Supports Wellbeing and a Sense of Connection

Many children and teenagers today are growing up in environments that are fast, overstimulating and relentlessly consumptive. Entertainment is instant. Validation is immediate. Adolescence itself can begin to feel strangely performative, shaped heavily by algorithms, comparison and the pressure to constantly curate an identity online.

And yet young people still need experiences that feel real. They still need challenge, responsibility, perspective and genuine connection to the world beyond themselves. They still need moments that are not mediated through screens or reduced to performance. They still need opportunities to feel capable, useful and grounded in something larger than the digital culture surrounding them.

This is one reason environmental education can feel so powerful when it is done well. It quietly restores some of the experiences modern childhood and adolescence have gradually lost.

A UCL Institute of Education study for The Wildlife Trusts of 451 children, mostly aged 8 to 9, found that wellbeing and connection to nature rose after outdoor nature activities, most of all for children who began with the lowest scores. For primary-aged children, regular outdoor learning is one way this connection grows. 

It Helps Children Take Responsibility for the World Around Them

Many teenagers are deeply aware that they are growing up during a time of enormous environmental, technological and social change. What they often lack is not awareness, but meaningful ways to engage thoughtfully with those realities.

Young people begin to experience themselves not simply as consumers of the world around them, but as people capable of understanding it, questioning it and shaping it thoughtfully. Knowing about a problem and feeling able to do something about it are separate things, and environmental education works on both. 

The Department for Education's Sustainability and Climate Change Strategy for England aims to prepare all young people for a world impacted by climate change through learning and practical experience, and to increase children's connection with nature. The UCL Study found that children's pro-environmental values rose after they took part in outdoor nature activities. 

How the Benefits Change From Primary to Secondary

Children gain different things from environmental education, and the benefits build on one another as children grow.